South Carolina Democratic primary 2016: news and updates

Here are Vox’s live results in the South Carolina primary race.

The 2020 Democratic candidates are headed to South Carolina, just the fourth state to weigh in on the presidential primary, and one that will reveal which candidates have the support of black voters.

Hillary Clinton absolutely crushed Bernie Sanders in the South Carolina primary election on Saturday, defeating the senator by nearly 50 points.

And Sanders appears very likely to be in for a lot more of these kind of losses over the next few weeks. His strategy hinged on pulling voters, particularly minority voters, from Clinton’s camp. But according to several recent surveys from Public Policy Polling, many of those voters may have already made up their minds.

Hillary Clinton didn’t just take the vast majority of the available delegates in South Carolina on Saturday night. She also took away one of Bernie Sanders’s strongest arguments — that he’s the candidate who has the most working-class support.

In Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders had done better than Clinton among voters in the lowest income brackets. That seemed to bolster his claim that his “political revolution” could energize millions of new low-income voters who typically don’t turn out to vote.

Hillary Clinton is on pace to beat Bernie Sanders by about 37 points in South Carolina, in large part because of her huge 87-13 margin among black voters. Clinton did even better among black voters than President Barack Obama in 2008, according to exit polling.

Her victory speech reflected her coalition. “We also have to face the reality of systemic racism that more than a half a century [after] Rosa Parks sat and Dr. King marched and John Lewis bled still plays a significant role in determining who gets ahead in America and who gets left behind,” Clinton said.

Hillary Clinton has two problems she needs to solve. If she wins the Democratic primary, she needs to do so without alienating Bernie Sanders’s voters. And if she’s going to win the general election and govern effectively afterward, she needs to run a campaign that doesn’t completely alienate independents and Republicans.

Both problems may have the same solution: Donald J. Trump.

Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign has always known that it needs to play catch-up with black voters if it’s going to win the Democratic primary. South Carolina was Sanders’s first big chance to show he could make inroads with this group, and it looks like he completely and utterly failed.

That is, needless to say, very bad news for Sanders. And if he can’t change those numbers, it’s going to be a huge problem for him throughout the South as well as in several Northern states like Maryland, Delaware, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey.

Hillary Clinton decisively won today’s South Carolina Democratic primary, according to multiple sources, by what election projections are calling an “overwhelming” margin. Final results are not yet in, but exit polls suggest she will secure 68 percent of the vote to Bernie Sanders’s 31 percent.

That 37 percentage point margin is even better than an expected victory margin of 26 percent based on RealClearPolitics’ pre-election polling average. Sanders never stood much of a shot in a state whose voters consist largely of African Americans and more conservative whites, with few of the white liberals who serve as his base.

Today, South Carolina will become the fourth state to cast its ballots in the Democratic nomination contest, as Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have one final face-off before next week’s Super Tuesday showdown. Polls in the state will be open until 7 pm Eastern.

South Carolina is the first state from the South to weigh in for Democrats and the most delegate-rich state to vote so far. But, like its fellow early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, South Carolina is more important for how it can reshape the political world’s perceptions of the race than it is for its delegates.